She got the robe open.

She lifted the hem of her undershirt.

And she turned her back to me.

And the sponge slipped straight out of my fingers and hit the floor with a wet slap, because I was not prepared — no one could have been prepared — for what four decades of that woman’s fierce, absolute privacy had been hiding.

Chapter 7 — The Scar

Her entire back, from the tops of her shoulder blades down to her waist, was one single, vast, deep scar.

I am not going to describe it in the way that people always wanted to look at it, the gawking way, because I learned that morning that Edith Ledbetter had spent forty years being looked at that way and I would not do it to her.